Friday, August 05, 2005

I thought I'd go to something a bit off the wall for the final session of the conference, so I ended up in Brian Aker's talk on Hacking Your Home Phone System. He talked about his experiences with Asterisk, an open sourced Linux PBX system, and Sipura telephone kit. The talk was a bit US-centric for obvious reasons, but interesting stuff none the less...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.